Creative Works

Moving Our Stories creative works are collaborative dance research endeavors, not easily encapsulated within traditional categories. They are interdisciplinary and multi-modal, large-scale yet hyper-local, durational and rigorous, and grounded in an ethic of community-based participatory action research.

Each photo below will take you to a video or website to learn more about the work.
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Photo by Jay White

Dancing in Darktown

An archives driven, contemporary dance exploration of Atlanta’s turn-of-the-twentieth century dance hall history. Through Moving Our Stories, Julie B. Johnson has collaborated with Victoria Lemos (Archives Atlanta) and an amazing cast of choreographer-performers, to research Atlanta’s history of dance halls and Black social dance, focusing on the intersection of ragtime-era social dance spaces and Progressive-era carceral politics through an abolition-feminist lens. The first iteration of this site-responsive, interactive, salon-style gathering featured movement and visual installations at Ernie’s in the Cut, with music curated by DJ EZ$. Future plans include multi-disciplinary works at additional sites connected to Atlanta's history of Black social dance, as well as forthcoming scholarly articles.

A Black women dances outside in front of a brick tower and green trees, eyes closed with her angular bent arms raised to the sky with open palms.

Photo by Julie B. Johnson

Idle Crimes & Heavy Work (ICHW)

A participatory, community-oriented dance research endeavor exploring the history of Black women's incarcerated labor, resistance, and restoration in Georgia. Through archival and embodied memory research, interactive performance, workshops, dance films, and community gatherings, ICHW connects the stories of women past and present to sites throughout Atlanta that were shaped by their labor but long since forgotten. ICHW strives to restore erased histories and emblazon the experiences of incarcerated Black women on the cityscapes of our community as an act of resistance through dances of love, liberation, and joy!

Three women stand in a green field next to a yard sign that reads “stop cop city.” They are smiling and laughing, a brick tower stands in the background.

Photo by Julie B. Johnson

For the Record: Dances to Stop Cop City

A Moving Our Stories dance film, For the Record… Dances to Stop Cop City is a collective dance action in the form of a video compilation of embodied testimonies speaking out against Atlanta’s proposed public safety training facility (aka “Cop City”). Pushing back against the false narrative that dissenters are all just “outside agitators,” participants collectively dream the future Atlanta we want to build together. Presented at What We Are Up Against: An Activist Cabaret at 7 Stages Theatre, a benefit produced by Shannon Turner, StoryMuse supporting four activist organizations: The Feminist Women’s Health Center, Community Estrella, Team Libertad, and Solutions Not Punishment Coalition (SNaPCo).

A group of Black women lay in a pile on a stage, leaning and resting on each other. String lights line the edge of the stage, black speakers sit in the background.

Photo by Clay Chastain

Georgia Incarceration Performance Project

The Georgia Incarceration Performance Project was a multi-year, cross-institutional endeavor between Spelman College and the University of Georgia exploring the history of incarceration and convict labor in Georgia. This archives-to-performance collaboration brought together students and faculty, archivists and librarians, Atlanta-based artists and designers, and justice-impacted students enrolled in college courses in Georgia-area prisons to conduct archival and embodied research through music, dance, theater, spoken word, and visual media. The work culminated in an evening-length production entitled “By Our Hands” and an accompanying archival exhibit, which premiered at UGA in November, 2019 and at Spelman in February, 2020. Phase IV entailed documentation and evaluation.

People gather, dance, and clap outside in a lot next to building at night with an image of an angel and ring shout dancers projected onto the wall.

Photo credit unknown

Remembrance as Resistance: Digitally Mapping the Ring Shout

In “Remembrance as Resistance: Digitally Mapping The Ring Shout,” with Moving Our Stories, StoryGround… a Dance Collective, and with visual artist, activist, and cultural organizer, Charmaine Minniefield. In this public art work, Minniefield leveraged technology to digitize historical memories and social context in her public art installation which premiered on the exterior of the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and history in Atlanta’s King Historic District. The work examines the institution of place and space as they inform identity and belonging by revisiting the Ring Shout - a traditional African American worship and gathering practice whose origins predate slavery out of West African ritual and ceremony.

Intentionally blurred image of three women dancers.

Photo by Renata Irving

Erasure, Resistance, & Survival

Moving Our Stories: Erasure, Resistance, and Survival is an embodied and collaborative exploration of “erasure.” Whether referring to the act of eradication or to the remnants of the past, exploring this term serves as an entry point to investigating our individual connection to collective narratives and histories of displacement, marginalization, and resilience. In solo work and communal research, the core question, “what does it mean to erase/be erased?” provides a guiding prompt through movement, writing, observation, and dialogue. “MOS: Erasure, Resistance, and Survival” is driven by two key collaborative threads: “Remembrance as Resistance: Digitally Mapping the Ring Shout” with visual artist, activist, and cultural organizer Charmaine Minniefield; and StoryGround… a dance collective, with Kalah Byrd, Tambra Omiyale Harris, and Nneka Kelly. The work culminated in an interactive, multi-modal, immersive experience as part of the The Dancer-Citizen Live: Moving the Map, an international, multi-city, live-streamed event.

Charmaine sits in a chair on the beach. Waves in the background, blue bucket under the chair, her feet rest on rocks.

Photo credit unknown, courtesy of Charmaine Minniefield.

Let Us Come Together

Artist-activist Charmaine Minniefield and choreographer-collaborator, Dr. Julie B. Johnson, call upon the Ring Shout as a historical African American spiritual practice, an act of resistance, and a mode of community-building amidst the forces that worked to dismantle communities. This project is part of Remembrance as Resistance: Preserving Black Narratives, a project by Charmaine Minniefield. “This collection of movement prayers and meditations performed remotely by women from their homes in different locations contemplates ‘togetherness’ in virtual spaces, and reflects on the ongoing unrest arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, the disproportionate toll it has taken on our black and brown communities, and the racial violence that attempts to silence our communities and erase us. The resulting work will bring the women together in a virtual Ring Shout to again inspire connection and community in spite of separation during this global pandemic.” The video resulting from this work is a combination of all of the individual performances.

Contact me to learn more about my creative works, publications, and academic work!

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